For some of my development projects I'm using git repositories because of the flexibility of it. But the initial beta phase I don't want to keep private until I created something working. Normally I use github.com repositories for them, a good service except you have to pay for private repositories.

So I searched the internet for private alternatives and installed gitlab on my CentOS 6 machine. It worked fine, but it was a bit of an overkill to manage about 10 repositories for only one user, myself. So I decided to migrate it back to the essence.

The essence as: the command line git server with a nice web interface on top of it to have a quick overview of the changes made in which repositories.

I based my git server setup on the git-scm tutorial after reading the chapter about the git-server. It a clear and detailed explanation of the different steps to configure your own private git server.

Once the server was running and I could create new repositories, clone them and push to them from the outside I looked for a nice web frontend. My first choice was the git-web interface with lighttpd as the backend web service. The installation of the gitweb service could also been found on git-scm.

For the lighttpd configuration I created a virtualhost pointing to the gitweb directory in /var/www/gitweb/.